-la and -a

Hi!I don’t understand why the difference in the following sentence:“Você só conseguirá testá-la mostrando-a e conversando com o maior número de pessoas possível.”I find this very confusing. When do you write -la and when -a?Thanks!

The honest answer is: when you develop an ear for the language, that is, after a lot of practice, especially a lot of decent Portuguese reading and edveloping a solif grammatical foundation (e.g., direct vs. indirect objects). This may sound insensitive, but it's true (many of us have been in your situation, regarding other languages, including, you guessed, English). The fact is that, for some constructions there is no learning shortcut, sorry.

In the meantime, you could go back to this earlier post, which is a virtual duplicate. There you find detailed explanations, to which you will need to refer back again and again, until the knowledge becomes solid. It's the nature of the beast.
--------------------------------------AHA: x-post with brasileirinho

Hi!I don’t understand why the difference in the following sentence:“Você só conseguirá testá-la mostrando-a e conversando com o maior número de pessoas possível.”I find this very confusing. When do you write -la and when -a?Thanks!

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I am not sure if it is a rule, and I am sure my english doesn't help, but in this case I think that there is a reason for the use of 'la' as pronoun, instead of 'a'.
I don't know what the pronoun satands(?) for, what is the word it is replacing, but let's imagine it is 'máquina', machine.

You would say: Você só conseguirá testar a máquina mostrando a máquina, etc. ('a', in this case has not the function of pronoun (I hope I can put it this way)).

Then, if you wanted to replace the noun 'máquina' by the pronouns, if languages were 'logical', it would be somethin like: Você só conseguirá testar-a, mostrando-a, etc.

This verb, testar, is in the infinitive (?) 'form' (tense?), as we can see it ends with a 'r'. And that's basically the reason. The 'r', I mean, beacuse of the way 'tetar-a' sounds. When that is the case, you use 'la'.

You can say 'testo-a', 'testei-a', 'testava-a', 'testando-a', but not 'testar-a';
also 'testarei-a' (in the future) is wrong (it has a 'r' there, to put it simple, and to put it the way I can explain), and so it becomes 'testá-la-ei' (or 'a testarei', I guess, in Brasil).

Other 'exception'.
I used maily examples with 'I', above (eu testo-a, eu testei-a, eu testava-a); if it was 'They' it would be 'eles testam-na', 'eles testaram-na', 'eles testavam-na', because when the 'verb form' ends with 'm' it the pronoun 'a' (or as, o, os) becomes 'na'.

But you should check your grammar book, because of possible exceptions (I only know this more or less by 'instinct').